


eternal

by zeprince



Category: Vinland Saga
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 21:01:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1563932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeprince/pseuds/zeprince
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the prince was just a boy, he found a part of himself in the arms of another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	eternal

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old ass fic but it's been sitting on my tumblr for months now and I wanted to fill this account up a little. 
> 
> I wrote this before a lot of the new chapters had been published - I think this was written when 97? 98? came out?

When the prince was just a boy, he found a part of himself in the arms of another.

He found himself in the arms of a man who told him of Love and promised him a kingdom not like the one his father held, but one only God could promise man. When Canute was a boy, Ragnar’s arms became his safety because there were no green pastures for a son who did not yet realize that his father didn’t love him.

Ragnar always knew he would learn, someday, but Ragnar was skilled in the art of lying to himself and so he became convinced that this was for the young prince’s own good.

Ragnar sang him lullabies and those were a few of the things that Canute carried with him for years to come. He showed him the love of God to fill the void that was left by the weight of living, and Canute was happy.

When Canute grew up, the love of his Father kept his mind at ease and his heart steady. His hand was never at home on a blade and he was useless for all manner of kingly things, but he could pray. For him, that was enough, and he decided to live a life worthy of his Father, and he was happy. He could still sing Ragnar’s lullabies to himself softly, and it was nice to have something to call his own.

Canute touched Thorfinn as if he were discovering something holy.

The boy was filthy. Every time Canute pulled back the hair from his face there was another layer of mud to hide behind, as though Thorfinn made armor from sludge and the blood of his enemies. It had taken so long for the short warrior to let Canute remove it, and Canute only felt a bit guilty about not allowing him the weight of the prince’s crown.

He didn’t mind getting his hands dirty so long as he could wipe sin from Thorfinn’s cheeks; how had that dirt wound up there? Why was he so bloody? They couldn’t be fighting that many battles. Men, God’s men, didn’t spend that much time killing the others. Where did Thorfinn find time for himself? Did he even have a soul anymore?

Canute tried not to dwell on it, only briefly when he prayed for forgiveness for the acts they committed alone at night. He wasn’t sure what needed forgiving; he knew Thorfinn needed him and in Thorfinn, he found peace.

The warrior himself was not peaceful, but there was something of God’s love in the way he let Canute trace his bottom lip with his fingers before replacing them with his lips. The prince had never felt warmer than he did in the freezing cold with his little broken piece of happiness by his side.

Sometimes, when they didn’t dare speak for fear of understanding, Canute would sing the songs Ragnar had taught him in a voice that was too shy to truly do them justice. Thorfinn never stopped him.

They didn’t have words for it, and there was no one they could ask to put a name to what they had. Things like happiness and peace and even love were only suitable if you said them quietly enough, and sometimes they would, just to taste them on their tongues.

It held too much weight for either of them to discuss now. They’d figure things out later; Thorkell and his band were on their heels, their fates once they reached the king were in question, and the world is much too complex to harbour any sympathy for a prince and a warrior in love.

Upon seeing the true face of the world, Canute abandoned all hope.

Nothing, however, made him colder than the fact that even though Thorfinn son of Thors was the farthest from the rotting bliss in the snow, Canute could not stop loving him.

I will make a paradise on earth he thinks, and there is no room for the little warrior in that paradise, he knows that already. He knows that redemption is not something he could ever bring to the other boy, but god does he wish he could.

He wishes he could fuck the devil out of him and pull him gasping from the sea of blood he was drowning in. He’d rip the warrior from hell if he could, but here were two ropes; one holding the kingdom, and the other, his love for Thorfinn.

One had to be cut.

Upon seeing the true face of the world, Canute knew which one.

Thorfinn almost made it easy; this way, he wouldn’t have to deal with it himself – he saw the way Thorfinn had stared at him, after his duel with Askeladd, surrounded by the words of men who should be kings when he himself was a wretched warrior damned for hell. Canute wished he could just wipe the fucking blood off his face like he used to, but he knew the stain was much deeper than that. ‘Take it off, take it off, take off your armour’, and so it goes.

When Thorfinn drew Canute’s blood for the first time with a blade – ‘because his lips made a battleground out of your royal skin and his touch drew blush to your cheeks like poison’ – Canute almost felt a sense of peace.

And now I can hate him, I can have him join my lovers in the snow, he thought to himself, but the face of a boy who’d lost everything was far more than he could bear.

He didn’t even have to convince himself that it would be kinder to sell Thorfinn to another man. He thought it was best.

It is worth it to note that it was not his father’s head that haunted him, at first, it was the nagging in his mind that told him ‘the night you made him a slave is the night you truly lost your love.’

Canute was finding it harder and harder to remember the words to Ragnar’s lullabies.

Thorfinn was like an uneasy thought that Lord Canute could easily let slip from his mind. Nightmares plagued his sleep interspersed with memories of skin on skin and quiet words that he had long ago forgotten the meaning of.

He spoke of his lost love in times of planning, on the brink of war, with the breath of battle caressing the back of his neck. He mourned for it at his brother’s deathbed; he felt it as a shield when his father’s head rolled at the floor, wrapping around his ankles like a cat.

To remember those times was to remember what paradise had felt like; he knew he would never see it again in his lifetime. He wanted the world that pure. He wanted something that beautiful. In his heart he knew it was love; but what fools they had been, to think that a loveless world could hold something so wonderful.

Silently, he resented the warrior boy. Did Thorfinn know the meaning of what had been exchanged between them? Could that stupid child even begin to understand what he had lost?

Canute tried not to think of the agony on Thorfinn’s facewhen he cut down Askeladd. He knew his answer was there, if he thought about it enough, but he grew too restless when he would dwell on such things.

Canute had been wounded before, and it felt nothing like the things that had engulfed him when he heard Thorfinn’s name for the first time in years.

It wasn’t painful. It was like he’d found God again.

But he wasn’t about to go down that road. Nostalgia wasn’t for men with their eyes set on the path ahead. The only Thorfinn was the one who would approach him painful minutes later. The only Thorfinn he saw now was bloody and soaked in mud and yet he did not wear the armor his youthful counterpart had.

He was changed, now. He spoke like Askeladd.

Canute vaguely remembers a time when Askeladd spoke like a king, too, but Thorfinn was not challenging for a crown. Thorfinn was not a challenge at all. He was something raw, something quiet, something that made Canute positively ache and it was all he could do to stand in front of him and say ‘You will have to stop me.’

Something else was calling Thorfinn to answer, now, and he had already made his decision before he spoke to Canute.

If they were alone, if they spent just ten minutes alone, perhaps they would reclaim a piece of what had been now that they both understood what it was that they had done.

They’d both grown so much, they had changed, and it would never be the same. Of course they both remembered what it had felt like to love one another. The agony of not realizing what that love had been while they were still young enough to believe in it made both of them want to scream.

They stood on the edge of forever, with philosophy and religion and good and evil and all the stories that will ever be told lain out in front of them. Nothing else mattered but the slave and the king, tangled in a web of screaming, desperate, yearning love that neither of them could escape from.

“Is this what you want from us, Father of Heaven!?”

Canute could feel his lips moving but he didn’t know if anyone could hear him.

Thorfinn looked out at him from underneath the dirt of the world, and Canute stepped toward him, the ocean crashing to his right. God’s world turned on but Canute could not let it happen.

All at once and all too quickly he became vastly aware of the expansiveness of their world; he felt as though he was aware of every thrumming thing, every last word, every inch of death that crawled across their lands and he was burning to turn it in his hands.

“What am I to do, Father?!”

He cried in agony, in the pain of losing his bit of peace for the complete unchangeable cacophony of the land they now stood on.

“Where is your love, Father of Heaven?! You give it to me so simply and it was only before I realized what I was holding that it was there to fuck me breathless. Father, why do you do this to me?! I cannot stop your oceans, so let me drown in this one!”

There was no ocean big enough to drown the sin of going against what you promised yourself, he decided, and he took Thorfinn’s bruised face between his hands and the shock of touching him for the first time in years left him trembling and naked in such a universal way that he understood now what it meant to say that something was holy.

Religion was the feeling of his lip’s against Thorfinn’s, of not even knowing what any slave or man or viking thought of it but tangling himself up in the despair of his dreams. Love was the feel of the slave’s fist balled in the front of Canute’s clothing and he lifted him to the heavens as if he were ascending, finally, but really he was descending into what he’d needed for so long.

“I loved you.” The king choked, and the understanding of the nights in the snow was something they could both grieve over, their corpses left behind on a trail blazed years ago and the words ‘Who murders lovers?’ etched into their minds.

The assassination of kings was a mild disturbance the eternity of what they were – two people who dared to feel each other’s lips in a way that had nothing to do with skin on skin, where bodies didn’t matter and there were hopes and dreams etched in the way they caressed one another.

And it was Dead, and they both knew it was Dead, and this was the twilight of their time and it ached. The whole world ached where it was packed in between their bodies, and not a single other man cared. Canute could only feel the blood of the dead seeping from between his fingers. He could only seal himself to this slave and beg for his forgiveness.

“There is no salvation alive for these men. There is no salvation left for us.”

What he meant was there was no salvation left for him. You deserve to walk free, Thorfinn, and I must let you go.

Someone killed the boys they had once been and the twisted, dirty things left over clung to one another on a field seeped in blood. They would not be the first, nor would this be the last time it would happen. And that is why Canute ached.

“Why, Father of Heaven?”

He choked, and he felt as though he bathed in sin, but still he clung to Thorfinn tighter.

“Why?”

God did not answer.

Canute did not have the wings to fly into the sun, but by god, did he burn.


End file.
